Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/134

 Rh dissertation on the position of women in the Moslim world, in which he told his co-religionists the full truth concerning this rather delicate subject. If social evolution takes the right course, the practice of polygamy will be abolished; and the maintenance of its lawfulness in canonical works will mainly be a survival of a bygone phase of development.

The facility with which a man can divorce his wife at his pleasure, contrasted with her rights against him, is a still more serious impediment to the development of family life than the institution of polygamy; more serious, also, than veiling and seclusion of women. Where the general opinion is favourable to the improvement of the position of women in society, there is always found a way to secure it to them without conflicting with the divine law; but a radical reform will remain most difficult so long as that law which allows the man to repudiate his wife without any reason, whereas it delivers the woman almost unarmed into the power of her husband, is considered to be one of the permanent treasures of Islâm.

It is a pity indeed that thus far women vigorously striving for liberation from those mediæval institutions are rare exceptions in Mohammedan